Monday, January 18, 2016

A Mechanical Assistant For The Tea Table

I shall, perhaps, be laughed at by some unfeeling censor, for including the tea table in the field of my mechanical speculations. But, in so doing, I seriously mean to be not only attentive, but useful to the ladies—who, I am old enough to believe, deserve this service at my hands. My object is to obviate for them the necessity of tediously wielding a ponderous tea-pot, until real and painful fatigue ensues: thus emphatically making a toil of that pleasure they had hoped for in administering comfort to others.

This new method of tea-making admits the use of the common tea urn—which is placed on the table near the left hand of the fair distributor. This arrangement is given at figs. 4 and 5 of Plate 27. There, A is the Urn; and B any common tea-pot, for whose spout, the cock a, has been substituted; and the handle of which has been slightly modified, so as to make it a proper centre of rotation. This tea-pot is, of course, opened before it is brought into the position shewn in the figures. At C b c, is placed, first of all, on the table, a stand of metal, terminated upward by the stem C D which forms a vertical centre to the whole apparatus: and which is sufficiently fixed[229] to the table by standing on three feet, b c, &c.; under which are stretched small pieces of Caoutchouc (or India rubber), which, by their adherence to the table, make the whole steady. By these means, the tea-pot can be turned round, by a gentle effort, till it comes under the cock of the urn, from which it receives the boiling water. And, finally, the tea-board, which is itself circular, revolves on the same axle C D, supported by the casters or rollers e f, and bringing successively all the tea-cups m, n, o, &c., to the spout of the tea-pot, where they are filled without the smallest difficulty, as will appear by a further inspection of the figures, and especially by an appeal to experience.

The above, I should presume, is all that need be said upon the subject. It remains for some rationally zealous friend of this social repast, to put these (or other analogous) ideas in practice: in which enterprize, should he succeed in pleasing the ladies, he may depend on the approbation of every lord who deserves the name.